


All My Restless Hours

by DelgadoAinley



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Aziraphale reads Sade, Ineffable Bureaucracy (Good Omens), Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), Ineffable Idiots (Good Omens), Is Aziraphale really oblivious though, M/M, Oblivious, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Snake Crowley (Good Omens), The Ineffable Plan (Good Omens), eventually explicit, really slow build
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-09
Updated: 2019-08-09
Packaged: 2020-08-13 16:10:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20177092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DelgadoAinley/pseuds/DelgadoAinley
Summary: It was sort of okay to be restless waiting for Aziraphale to notice you if you were also waiting for the Apocalypse. One could say there was even sort of a pleasure in the daydream of Crowley noticing while you were studiously avoiding reporting back to Gabriel about the said Apocalypse, especially as the Tuesday Training in Heaven was ineffably boring. But the Apocawasn't Apocadidn't and now neither of them know quite what to do with all that restlessness. One thing they are quite sure of though is that neither Heaven or Hell's messengers will leave them alone for very long.





	All My Restless Hours

**Author's Note:**

> I ship these ineffable idiots SO hard but this is my first fic and I probably got a thousand things wrong. This is going to be a really slow build because lets face it, Neil Gaiman is the master of the slow build here.

6000 years was a long time to be restless.

6000 years was a long time to be oblivious too but apparently Aziraphale had managed that quite well, though sometimes Crowley wasn’t sure. Something in the skid of his cerulean eyes, a scintilla of something other before the angelic expression crept back on the, well, angel. Crowley told himself it was a trick of the light, a little too much drink, a little too much of this beautiful human world he wasn’t meant to love.

Fairs fair though, he wasn’t meant to love an angel either.

It wasn’t like you could be frustrated with Aziraphale for being oblivious either, he just…was. Though he read books about love, poets who tore their hearts out chasing after it – and do you know how painful it was to listen to Aziraphale quote Byron while his own Byron (with better hair of course) was stood right there? Lurking lurkily – he did a good line in lurking. He had pages of the greatest love stories and Crowley was pretty damn certain he’d seen a few of the old Marquis De Sade tucked amongst the shelves too but the angel still remained as clueless a lamb wandering into a slaughterhouse.

Which he did, often. For an immortal being Aziraphale wandered himself into some dicey situations. Crowley was always there to rescue him of course and Aziraphale was always beautifully thankful and not at all frustrating. Not at all in need of Crowley just picking him up and throwing him…

He coughed, tilting his glasses down with a hooked finger. The monochrome majesty of his flat stood behind him and all of London before him. Or a bit of it anyway, the bit he liked. You could sod off with the North of it. Cars choked their way down a narrow road outside, edging past a Bentley that shouldn’t be parked there, ignoring all the no parking signs.

No, Aziraphale wasn’t frustrating at all. _“Do try a California roll.”_

Crowley bloody hated sushi. It was most definitely a thing of Hell’s own devising. He put his money on Hastur. Aziraphale loved it, went into raving ecstasies about how clever humans were to make up the designs and create such little pieces of art, Crowley, just look, dear boy, see the little pearls?

And another thing, Aziraphale’s voice shouldn’t be that deep, like whiskey over ice, when he was talking about sushi, or trees, or the sky, or the Apocawasn’t, or…anything. It was positively _sinful._

_ “You know I hate sushi.”_

He could hear, rather than see, the little pout of Aziraphale’s full lips behind him. The angel would be pouting, holding the sushi aloft in a hopeful gesture that perhaps the demon would relent this time and just try, just try for me one little bite, won’t you? There you go, that’s the ticket.

And Crowley would walk over broken glass for him, he’d crawl through Hell and bring back the throne for Aziraphale, but he wasn’t going to try bloody sushi.

_ “No,”_ Crowley added.

Aziraphale’s mouth snapped shut, eyes wide in surprise_. “How did you…”_

_“Because,”_ Crowley’s fingers snaked over the wrought iron railing protecting him from falling headlong off the balcony into the road. Not that it would have done any damage to him but he’d just bought this jacket and road grit was a bugger to get out.He turned, swallowed, committed his life to Aziraphale when he met his eyes and grunted, _“Because I know you, angel. You were going to tell me just try one eensy bit, it’ll be marvelous, really it will, tickety-boo and all that._”

A golden eyebrow arched as Aziraphale huffed, _“I don’t say tickety-boo nearly as often as you insinuate I do.”_

A slow, crooked smile spread over the demon’s face. _“Oh no?”_

_“No. I’m rather reserved with the use of it, in fact. You…you don’t know me as well as you think you do.”_ Aziraphale’s neck itched, the way it always did when he told a lie. Enough, the angel told himself, this was Crowley’s bit of exposition and he wasn’t going to like you bursting in on it was he?

** (Technically he couldn’t lie. Technically he couldn’t stand in hellfire either or lose the antichrist.)**

“_The mailman, the bakery, that pen you saw in that fancy looking store, that copy of Hamlet and my new red leather couch,”_ Crowley pointed out, ticking them off on slender fingers that were rather too talented.

_“What about them?”_

_"You told them all they were tickety-boo,”_ Crowley announced, drawing out the phrase with a flourish and a flick of his fingers right underneath Aziraphale’s nose. A small flame burst from them, nearly singing the angel. “_Oops.”_

Aziraphale huffed again, lifted his chin in that pompous way all the good angels had and snuffed out Crowley’s fingers. The audible hiss was definitely from the fire going out and not from Crowley at all.

_“Ssstop that_.” Oh for…someone’s sake.

_“Well… I…well, you’re just lucky you helped me to save the world yesterday, Crowley or…or I’d be taking offence at that.”_ His neck itched again.

_“No, you wouldn’t,”_ Crowley drawled, leaning back against the railing, arching his back. Aziraphale’s eyes slithered down his body before he reminded himself he was an angel and brought them back up sharply to contemplate the mysteries of Heaven. Like why it was captured in Crowley’s eyes for example and why he chose to hide said mysteries behind those shades.

Aziraphale was a kind, gentle, book loving, human liking, above all soft angel, but he dearly wanted to smash Crowley’s sunglasses to smithereens, violently, because they hid those _eyes._

Crowley hadn’t noticed of course. Crowley was oblivious. Had been for nigh on 6000 years in fact. Aziraphale held back a tut and waited for Crowley to finish looking over the railing at the people below.

The demon twisted his fingers. One of the people down below dropped their phone, the screen cracking as it hit the concrete. They stopped, cursed, bent down and picked it up, began swearing at a passerby who stood on a fragment of the glass. Temptation done for the day then, Crowley thought, looking back.

Aziraphale was watching him steadily, the blue eyes like the mid-morning sky showing a flash of something Crowley could never catch. Crowley’s lips twitched, _“That’s tickety-boo then isn’t it?”_

Aziraphale’s lips twitched too, tried to hide the fact that they were twitching. The angel looked down, fought back a grin, lifted his gaze back to Crowley’s and his eyes were dancing. A brilliant smile lit up his face.

After a moment, or another 1000 years, Crowley was never sure when Aziraphale smiled like that, the angel said, _“So, Apocalypse didn’t happen, trials successfully evaded by ourselves. I played rather a brilliant part if I do say so myself. What are we to do now?”_

Crowley’s lips curled into another crooked smile, “_If it involves tickety or booing,”_ Aziraphale warned lightly and his voice _**shouldn’t**_ really have been able to drop any further than that, any further than was humanly possible, though of course, he wasn’t human.

_ “Really, angel, I was going to suggest that we consider our mutual situation. I have demons that want me dead for the killing of other demons. You have Gabriel and Michael who want you dead for not being a pompous shit.”_

6000 years ago Aziraphale would have hotly defended his brothers.

6000 years and 1 day it was now and this first day he didn’t really feel like pointing out that Gabriel wasn’t purposely pompous, he just was. Or that Michael had a lot on his plate, what with all the commanding and things. No, now he felt like agreeing. “_Yes.”_

Crowley’s eyebrows rose in mutual surprise, met each other and danced a little jig. _“Tickety…”_ He bit back a groan as Aziraphale’s eyes flashed holy fire. “_Tickety-not-boo then, you know they’ll come for us again. Not a huge display like last time but one on one maybe. Gabriel won’t let it drop.”_

Aziraphale had read a lot of books that dealt with emotions. He thought perhaps that the expression on Crowley’s face right now might be ‘savage protectiveness ’ if you read Sade, but Sade hadn’t known Crowley. Or, he had, but Aziraphale rather blocked that out of his mind. _“To planning then?”_


End file.
